Beware the effective altruists, old-fashioned way to tame AI and other commentary

“Effective Altruism is the unseen force driving AI safety discourse” as “EA crowd is trying to restrict your access to the most important technology of the 21st century,” fumes Shyam Sankar at The Free Press.“EA is a utilitarian philosophy” that “leads in strange directions,” “obsessed with quantifying existential risk”; it “claims rationality and precision,” but “delivers neither” — as, e.g., “a human life can become a rounding error in somebody else’s calculation of the greater good.” These “doomsayers are the Leninist vanguard of the algorithmic age,” writing a recipe for “despair and failure.” No! AI “is underwriting the next 250 years of American greatness,” so “we should insist on the freedom to build it ourselves.”A “better approach to AI safety” than a bureaucracy of regulators “runs through the old-fashioned legal system,” contends Judge Glock at City Journal.

Indeed, “legal claims for damages” against a company “may provide the best mechanism to prevent the dangers of AI while preserving its advantages.” While “the competitive play of the market forces companies to treat their customers well,” lawsuits have historically served to make businesses pay for “dangers” they create for “non-customers,” obliging them to “game out dangerous scenarios and prevent them.” Bureaucracies “will never have as much insight” or “incentive” to prevent harm as the labs themselves.They’d just “orient the companies to the demands of a small, unrepresentative group.” Far better to let “lawsuits punish bad behavior.”“Gas bills are expected to jump in Pennsylvania and other states because ratepayers cover the costs when utilities build new power plants and install pipes and other equipment” to generate “the power that data centers” need, notes RealClear Investigations’ Oliver Lee Bateman.

Yet one “obvious solution to rising rates for consumers” is to require these ...